While lying in the wet thicket, where she thrashed in spite of her determination to lie still, Sarah’s dreams grew more vivid. The sun rode high in the sky while she slept and dreamt. Her past came swirling at her in dust clouds that covered her until she couldn’t see anything else. In her dreams it was one continuous Sunday, a glorious day with no sound of the whip, and a chance to play or think. Everyone was in her vision: Mama, Papa, Esther, and Albert, just before—
But even in dreams she wouldn’t let her mind go to that terrible day. Instead, she stuck to other memories, the happy ones, all jumbled up into one delicious stew of Sundays.
CHAPTER 4
I wake up to the smell of Sunday pancakes, and it wafts right through me, wrapping my gut in pleasure. Dad’s cooking a batch of fluffy ones, his weekend specialty. After all these years, he still makes a deal out of frying an N for me, a J for Jimi, and an S for himself, and I still think it’s cool that the pancake batter can form solid letters. It was always magic, how I could bounce down to breakfast and find a golden N on my plate. This morning at Dad’s place, it seems strange not to have Mom’s M in the pan, another of those where-am-I-now moments. I rub my eyes and wait for seconds, but even with that aroma tugging at me, I’m still thinking about Sarah.
“Why did she have to leave her family?” I ask Dad. “I mean, I know about runaways, but why couldn’t they all go together?”
“Sugar, I can’t tell you what’s going to happen.” He brings the second batch to the table. The smell is driving me crazy. “You’ll have to wait to see how it unfolds.”
“Well, you know, don’t you? You wrote it. And it’s a true story. You said it’s our family history.”
Jimi pushes against me, reaching for the maple syrup. “Don’t chew with your mouth open,” I tell him sharply. Jimi stares without blinking, like he’s daring me, and stuffs his cheeks. A piece of pancake dribbles from his lips, but he grins right through it. Whatever he was whimpering about last night looks long gone.
“She was my great-grandmother,” Dad says, not answering my question. “From what we know, this is how it happened. Not exactly with the details I’m writing, since I have to fill in the blanks, but the essence is true.” His voice sounds scratchy, as if he has an allergy or cold.
“Tell me more about the chapter you read last night,” I beg. “Why was she on the run by herself? What happened to her family?”
All of a sudden I want to race into Jimi’s room and burrow under my blanket, grown up as I am. I’m so glad I have a bed, even the rickety one here at Dad’s. But instead I ask again, and again he answers, “Wait for it to unfold.” I do know one thing about my dad: once he says no, he means it. Not like Mom, whom I can usually convince to change her mind. So I ask something else that’s bothering me.
“What did that ol’ miss mean when she said, ‘the more they grow for market’? Was she gonna sell the kids?”
“Well, in slavery times”—his voice goes all pompous, like I don’t know anything—”masters did sell the children. Especially in the 1850s. The price of slaves had risen dramatically. And in Virginia, where Sarah’s family was, tobacco land was worn out.” He stops, and I see the muscles in the side of his neck twitching. “And they talk about stealing! Who stole who?” He’s become livid.
“I know.” Doesn’t he think I learned anything about slavery at school? But why be furious about it now? It’s the twenty-first century, Dad. The world has changed. I’m the living proof, aren’t I? Nobody’s growing me for market. And our family shows how different things are. “Why wouldn’t Sarah’s mother tell her about it? And hide her or something?”
Dad sighs. I smell burning, but he doesn’t notice until Jimi shouts, “Dad! The pancakes!”
“Oh, yeah …” Dad jumps up. When he comes back he says, “She couldn’t. It was too painful. What could she say? She tried to hide the truth as long as she could. That was the hiding she did. Occasionally, mothers did flee with their children into the swamps, but it was very, very dangerous.” He stops. Jimi and I are sitting still. Jimi’s not even chewing. “Dogs were sent to sniff them out, vicious dogs. So, Sarah’s mother—your great-great-great-grandmother—did her best by not delving into what was happening but simply keeping them all fed and as safe as she possibly could.”
This sounds familiar, I think. Not delving. I wish somebody would delve into what’s happening to Jimi. Or Jessica and me. We’d been like twins; the summer we were nine, before she and Fran and I started acting like triplets, Mom bought us matching yellow shorts and tank tops that we wore every day. When we were out in public, we told people we were sisters. I still smile when I remember what fun that was, even though it makes my head hurt too. We wore those yellow shorts until they tore apart. When the seat was full of holes, I still begged Mom to let me wear mine. When she threw them out, I cried so hard that she fished them out of the trash and washed them, and told me I could wear those shorts until they fell off my body.
Three years ago, on my birthday, Jessica and I even bought friendship rings at the mall. We pricked our fingers with a safety pin to put our blood on the rings, so we’d be blood sisters forever. “You are my true sister,” we vowed, and swore we’d never take them off. I look down at the silver glinting on my finger. After all that, how could there be this strange barrier between us, like an invisible wall that I can’t reach through?
All morning Jimi and I fool around, teasing each other, tossing a Nerf ball back and forth, until we tumble into playing our old childhood “bed football” on Dad’s bed. Just as we did when we were small, we dive, and whoever gets the ball hangs on while the other one leaps on top, trying to grab it. Big as I am, it brings back a sense of normalcy, having fun in the same way we have for so many years. We pin each other to the mattress and laugh a lot. But once I hold Jimi down, and I’m pressing his shoulders back, I see tears in his eyes again. This is so not like him.
“What’s going on?” I demand. “I didn’t hurt you.”
He watches me while I stare at him until he shifts his eyes away. “I know.”
“So?” I raise my fist.
“It’s just … that boy,” he says. “He’s going to—”
“Going to what?” I’m tired of his cat-and-mouse game. “Who?”
“I can’t tell you,” he says. “He’d kill—”
“Kill? What’s going on?” When he doesn’t respond, I start to call, “Daaad.” But after Jimi turns white—and that’s a feat—I stop. “Jimi, you’ve gotta tell me. I’ll take care of it. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I’ll talk to him.”
“No!” he says. “He can’t know I told you anything.” He covers his face with his hands.
“Well, you hardly did,” I say, disgusted again, but with a fresh seed of worry in the pit of my stomach. And no matter how I try to worm it out of him, even when I promise I won’t tell Mom or Dad, Jimi won’t say more.
That afternoon I ride the bus to meet Jessica and Claudette at the mall for a two o’clock movie. “Hey,” I call when I see them outside. I wonder what they’ve said to each other about me. Before, it was always Jessica and Fran and me talking about everybody else. Nowadays, I always seem to arrive too late.
The three of us walk into the lobby, with its frayed red carpet and giant cardboard posters of coming attractions, and stand in line to buy soda and popcorn. It’s noisy, with kids calling out to each other and a mass of kids pressing behind me. “Stop pulling on my backpack,” I hear Claudette say to a boy behind her, and she starts lecturing him on common decency. Up a short flight of stairs I spot Lavonn with Demetre, who has all the answers in every class and lets everybody know it. When Lavonn waves, I motion that I’ll go over after I get my Hershey bar.
Before I can get there, a boy—the one Lavonn was talking to at school—prances over to the girls, then other kids swarm them, the boys slapping each other, calling “Dawg!” and cracking up. They’re loud; I watch a box of popcorn fly into the air and scatter.
Claudet
te looks over too and spins back to us. “Ghetto,” she says, with a look I’m starting to recognize, while she arches her long back.
“Yeah,” Jessica echoes, wrinkling her nose exactly the way Claudette does.
I stare at them. If Lavonn and Demetre are ghetto, and Jessica and Claudette are hills or preppy, what am I? Some kids say they’re “mixed,” but I’m not mixed, I’m scrambled—a bunch of separate pieces all jumbled in one body that hardly recognizes my best friend, shuttles between two homes, and has no idea what’s terrifying my brother.
“What you want?” the kid behind the counter asks. A black kid. Before, I wouldn’t have thought twice about that. Now I see how different he looks from Jessica and Claudette, with his huge black sweatshirt and backward hat, how completely different even his voice sounds.
“Large Coke, no ice,” Claudette tells him in her bossy voice, looking away. Jessica orders “water, no ice, and large popcorn with butter” in the same imperial tone. I mumble, “A Hershey bar, please,” and, since Lavonn has disappeared, I plan to wander into the movie with them.
“Hey,” Jessica says, and her voice holds a tinge of the old warmth when she looks at me. “Let’s not see Prom Parade,” the romantic comedy we’d bought tickets for. She glances over her shoulder toward the ticket taker, then whispers, “We’ll sneak into New York Tango.” She points to a vivid poster for the R-rated movie, featuring a woman in a skin-tight red dress standing in front of a man crouching behind her with a gun, his face half covered by a cowboy hat.
“Yeah,” Claudette agrees. “A thriller. It’s supposed to be hot.”
“Okay,” I say nervously. “But how will we get in?”
“Nobody’s looking,” Claudette urges, her eyes swiveling around the lobby. “Come on.”
We slide into the last row of seats, but the movie is stupid and there’s so much blood I have to keep looking away. Plus, the man with the ridiculous hat, who’s not really a cowboy, treats the woman in the red dress like dirt. All I can think is I’m sitting next to Jessica Raymond, red jersey number nine, and suddenly I don’t know her. Who wants to see this kind of stuff? What kind of person is Jessica if she likes this violence? Or is she faking to get in with Claudette, and if she is, what kind of integrity does she have?
Once the horrible film is over at last, my stomach feels queasy. The three of us slouch against a wall outside, rehashing the movie: “Hey, what about when he kissed her for like half an hour? I think his tongue was halfway down her throat!” The other two girls scream while I try to enjoy the camaraderie, and my stomach settles down until I trudge by myself down to El Camino for the bus. It’s lonesome in the fading afternoon light, with dry leaves blowing around. I’m chilly too. When I ride by the first corner of San Joaquin Boulevard, I glimpse a man on the sidewalk leaning against a gray wall where the paint from the Grove Liquor and 7-Up store is peeling off. As the bus moves on, I see a group of teens; girls with dreads wearing white tees and jeans, and two boys walking in that special way, rolling from side to side with their pants falling off. When we stop at a light I hear a car radio blasting rap so loud my temples pound, and I feel like a traveler from another land.
Dad’s supposed to drive me home later that night, but I knock on the door of his study, a tiny room off the hall that’s more like a closet. “Can I stay over again? I could go back home in the morning and leave my stuff there before school. I have my homework here.” I stop and throw him my innocent look. “It’s almost done.”
He pulls his glasses down to give me his special, intense stare.
“The bus starts going at six. Six-o-five.” I can’t tell what he’s thinking, now that he’s back to being the old Dad, where his face doesn’t show a thing. There’s a minute of silence while I try to look like this is a great idea, until he smiles and grumbles, “Call your mother.”
Mom asks softly, “Are you having that good a time?”
“Yeah. Jessica and Claudette and I went to the movies and hung around downtown. Dad’s reading me this story he’s writing. It’s cool.”
“Oh, that. I know about that.” Her voice has a sharp edge. But she says yes, and when I hang up I throw a Nerf ball at Jimi, who’s quiet, not like his old self at all.
After dinner I ask Dad, “How ‘bout another chapter?” I lean over his shoulder at the dining table, where he’s reading the New York Times and muttering.
“Dad …”
“‘Thieves,’ they say! People left to starve. Or trying to get back a tiny fragment of the wages they’ve been robbed of for generations.” He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes, and looks at me. “Oh, baby, I’m tired.” Yeah, me too, of listening to this rant. I know all that happened in the past, back in Miss Sarah’s time, but it’s over now, isn’t it? Even if the people in Oakland did suffer a little more than white people might after an explosion, do we have to talk about it all the time? The sun is starting to get almost yellow again and the air isn’t quite as smoky. I’m not coughing as much, and neither is Jimi, I notice.
“I know, Dad, but just one chapter?” I rub my cheek against his, trying to revive the old Dad.
“It’s Sunday night, I have work …” He glances back at the paper. “Look at that!” he says, pointing to a photo of people jammed into an old Oakland armory. “They’re sleeping head to toe on the floor. Left to rot …”
“Please?” I use my best-girl voice again, ignoring the photo.
He laughs. “You’re like Sarah, relentless.” Then he surprises me. “Read the next chapter yourself. It’s in my study; you can read in there. ‘Chapter Two—Did God Make White People Too?’“ His dark eyes pierce me. “It’s in the blue folder on my desk.”
Whoa, Dad’s never talked like that before. Usually he’s “Don’t touch my desk, don’t go near it, don’t even touch my chair!” Everything’s changing so fast, minute to minute, it’s hard to keep up. And that chapter, ‘Did God Make White People Too?’ I wonder what Jessica would say. Or Mom. Once, years ago, when our family was walking in San Francisco, a guy sitting on the sidewalk pointed at Mom holding hands with Dad and shook his fist, yelling, “Leave the brother alone!” I wanted to creep away, so he wouldn’t think I was white and shout at me too. But I guess he could tell. Why would a being who knows everything make people look so different they want to fight each other?
With a sigh I head to Dad’s study’s, which is neat, as always: stacks of paper lined up with the edge of the desk, and in the middle the blue folder marked with red ink, MISS SARAH ARMSTRONG: ON THE RUN. A photograph in a silver frame catches my eye. It’s next to one of me and Jimi in the park: this shows Dad and a woman, laughing, with his arm around her. Suddenly I remember her. Helane. At the end of the summer she was in our house. It was freaky. After Mom came home from work one day and called from the front door, “Hi, I’m home,” she stepped down to the den and scooted right back out like a witch was in there, like her hair was on fire. She slammed the front door, and Jessica and I heard her gun the motor on the Honda and peel out of the driveway. When Helane and Dad crept out a few minutes later, we watched them from the kitchen. Helane is thin, with a short Afro—almost bald—and she walks real smooth, like a knife cutting through butter. Dad had one arm over her shoulder, while the other was clutching a folder, and he hardly said a word before he opened the front door and blocked our view. Jessica and I stared at each other. We couldn’t believe it. I promised myself then that if I ever saw Helane again, I’d cut her dead. And here she is, smiling out at me as if she … belongs. I want to pick it up and fling it against the wall as hard as I can, but I don’t dare. Instead I turn it facedown and shove it under a pile of papers. When I do that, a few pages flutter to the floor. I deliberately push more off, then a whole bunch. All of a sudden I want to scatter every paper in his study, create a blizzard, and laugh at the paper storm. But if Dad came in, he’d kill me. So I don’t make more, but I leave the mess I made on the floor, open the blue folder, and begin to read, forgetting all about Jessica, M
om, whoever’s tormenting Jimi, and those terrible fires burning up the homes of black people twenty miles away.
Did God Make White People Too?
On Sundays Sarah and Esther crept out of sight of the cabins. The long-limbed Sarah, thick hair tumbling in every direction, moved quickly. Her sister, lighter skinned, with fine hair cut close to her head, stumbled after, always managing to trip over a tree root, scraping palms and skinning knees. Sarah had to turn away if Esther’s gashes were deep. Though she tried to be brave in front of her sister, she couldn’t look at the wounds without feeling sick.
When the girls got to the creek, they’d walk all the way to the spot where it widened out and joined the Pamunkey River. They’d found a special grassy clearing where they liked to lie on their backs, stare up at the sky, and talk. Other children, gathering nuts in the woods, wandered by occasionally, but for the most part they were alone.
“Where is heaven?” Esther asked one time. She turned onto her side, wide hazel eyes fixed on her sister.
“It’s high. Way, way up in the sky. Someday we’ll be there.” Sarah spoke authoritatively. Eight years old now, she took her big-sister role seriously. “It’s good there. When we die and Papa dies, we’ll get to be with him all week long.” Sarah studied the clouds. Sunday was the one day they could be together as a family, before her father, Albert Winston, returned to the next-door tobacco farm, the huge Winston plantation where he spent the week. Sarah turned to face Esther, smiling, and tugged down her little sister’s shirt. Like all the younger children, little Esther wore only a shift, slit up the sides.
Though her father was a Winston, Sarah’s name was Armstrong, like her mother, Yasmine, and Esther and little Albert. They were all Armstrongs, her mother had explained when responding to Sarah’s persistent questions one Sunday, “‘cause Master Armstrong owns us.” Yasmine had said this with a voice so sharp it made Sarah’s mouth taste like metal. “We take ol’ massa’s name.” Sarah had wanted to know more, but could tell by the frown on her mother’s face that she’d get no more answers that day.
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